The first rule of royalty is to smile. The second rule is to do good work with decent people and make other people happy in the process. It’s not a difficult job, especially if you’ve been trained to do it since birth. Ever since Megxit, though, Prince Harry has done precisely the opposite. The nation’s least favourite poor little rich boy has been shouting the odds, scowling and stomping up the steps of the law courts and complaining bitterly about everything. Until now. This week we saw what might be the first glimmerings of the way forward for Harry. This week he went back to the royal rule book and this week he stopped sulking and played a blinder.
He started by showing a bit of respect, laying a wreath and flowers on the Windsor tomb of his beloved grandmother Queen Elizabeth II. From there, he fooled about with seriously ill children at the Well Child awards and made them smile. On day two he went to Nottingham and did good work with decent people. He highlighted the issues of youth violence and knife crime and made a “personal” donation of £1.1 million to help tackle it. He raised a laugh reminiscing about the city’s “banging” jerk chicken and dropped in on a local radio station. He might have been laying it on a bit thick when he claimed that Nottingham had “a permanent place in my heart” although, having said that, his first walkabout in 2017 with his new fiancée was in Nottingham, so maybe it does. They were mobbed by cheering crowds, back in those heady days before they decided that we were all awful and England was a dump.
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Day three and he was back in London, at a laboratory at Imperial College which he himself opened, in 2013. The lab now houses the Royal British Legion Centre for blast injury studies, full of decent people doing good things. He made them smile and he did it again at an Invictus reception and again at the Diana Award yesterday. The charity’s website is perhaps the only place where you’ll see Prince William and Prince Harry mentioned positively in the same breath.
“The Diana Award,” the website reads blandly, “has the support of both her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry.” Somebody on their respective staffs must have agreed that William would leave the coast clear for Harry this year, suggesting that at least one person in California might be talking to another person at whichever “cottage” or ten-bedroom “lodge” William lives at these days. Either way, Harry was flying solo in their mother’s memory, launching an initiative on future youth leadership, having a round table discussion and, in the words of his press release, “helping bridge business investment and youth development” to unlock potential.
Prince Harry arriving at the WellChild awards in London this week
PETER MACDIARMID
“Through this award,” he said, “I’ve had the privilege of meeting young people who have turned adversity into action … the kind of untapped potential we can’t afford to overlook.” True, he then went a bit Meghan with talk of authenticity, truth and honesty, but at least he didn’t go down the full turtling and sitting in his knowledge route, so hats off for restraint. Weary courtiers could perhaps note in passing that helping young people to overcome adversity is exactly, word for word, what his father aimed to do when he set up the Prince’s Trust in 1976.
The trip was, naturally, dominated by whether he would meet the King. Unusually, though, the Sussex camp were not thinking out loud about the prospect. Instead, after a prolonged bout of will they/won’t they conducted behind closed doors, his father found time in his busy schedule to meet his errant son. The pair were reunited over tea at Clarence House for the first time in 18 months after some careful forward planning and nimble footwork.
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Harry raced to Clarence House from an engagement up the road, which takes him quite a lot longer now he doesn’t get blue-lit through the traffic. Meanwhile Charles, who was still theoretically on holiday in Scotland, always had engagements in London which could plausibly bring him back early, and without it looking like he was dashing around after his son. He was said to be keen personally to award an MBE to Manfred Goldberg, a Holocaust survivor, and he did. Buckingham Palace later confirmed that Charles and Harry had tea and said no further comment would be forthcoming. Harry’s team said the same, amid reports that he had to go further and promise his father that their conversation would remain private.
“This is an important first step towards rebuilding their father and son relationship,” a ‘royal insider’ told the Mail. “He has told his father he won’t be giving any interviews about it and his team has been instructed not to brief journalists about what was said. There’s a long way to go before Harry can earn his family’s trust, but he’s given some assurances.” For now, they seem to be holding. Arriving at an Invictus event straight from Clarence House, he was asked how his father was. “He’s great, thank you,” he replied and left it at that, which the Palace might reflect is a distinct improvement on what happened last time: he gave an interview to American TV and said, “I don’t know how long he has left.”
And while Harry has talked repeatedly of late about his hopes for a reconciliation — itself a source of irritation at the Palace — from the King’s point of view only now was the timing right. Charles is said to have been unwilling to meet Harry while he was still involved in legal action against the Home Office about his police protection. Courtiers took a dim view of His Majesty’s son pursuing His Majesty’s government through His Majesty’s courts and concluded that the answer when it came to a face-to-face meeting was “better not”. With that dispute solved, albeit to Harry’s dissatisfaction, the path was clear. Charles is said to be “extremely hurt” by Harry’s behaviour, as indeed was his mother before him. Nevertheless, he is 76 years old and Harry is his son, so the lines of communication between the two are now evidently open. If they’re also open between Harry and Oprah, or indeed Meghan and People magazine, we might not be out of the woods yet.
Harry will fly back home to California after four days of textbook royal work. He does it brilliantly — he knows he does it brilliantly — and he enjoys doing it because he’s brilliant at it, which is presumably why he was grinning from beginning to end. Was it also because there wasn’t a small voice in his ear whispering, “I can’t believe we don’t get paid for this”? Was the success of this week at least in part because nobody said, “How can we monetise this?” and because everything he did was about other people, not him or the H&M brand? Who knows? But after six years of false starts and harking back, maybe he’s finally hit on a blueprint for the future. No more fake photo shoots on Remembrance Sunday, no more fake royal tours, no more poor little rich boy.
If Meghan sells enough jam to pay the bills, and if he comes back every so often to do his old job, and if they both keep their traps shut and the dust settles, could that work? That’s a lot of ifs and Prince William will no doubt have plenty of buts. But after the neverending tantrum of the Harry and Meghan show, it would be ironic if he found himself right back where he started: smiling, and making other people smile too.